Robotics

Fedora provides a multitude of useful packages for roboticists of all skill levels and areas of concentration. The Fedora Robotics SIG focuses on making the latest and greatest robotics software available to the Fedora community. This page showcases some of the technologies included in Fedora. These packages are all part of the Robotics Suite in Fedora 15 and beyond.

RCSS is a research tool for multi-agent systems and AI in which two teams of simulated autonomous robotic players can play soccer.

Player

About

Player is a free and open networked robotics server. The Player server acts like a "robot abstraction layer," providing standardized interfaces and messaging management for many classes of robotics-related devices (camera, ranger, planner, etc.) Drivers for individual devices abstract information into these interfaces and use them to communicate amongst each other. Player also includes a set of client libraries in C, C++, Python, and Ruby which enable outside programs to subscribe to interfaces provided by the Player server. Several utilities are included for logging, viewing, and sending data. Also included are example programs using the client libraries and examples of plugin device drivers.

In Fedora, Player provides over 130 different drivers, ranging from device drivers and data processing drivers, to complex path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithms.

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Fawkes

About

Fawkes was developed and used over four years for cognitive robotics real-time applications like soccer and service robotics. It supports fast information exchange and efficient combination and coordination of different components to suit the needs of mobile robots operating in uncertain environments.

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Stage

About

Stage is a free and open 2.5D robot simulator. It can be used on its own, or as an extension of the Player robot server. Stage supports simulation of vehicle movement, and various sensors such as scanning laser range finders, SONAR arrays, cameras, fiducial markers, etc. Use of simplified sensor and movement models provide good fidelity and great scalability: Stage can easily simulate 100 or more robots, and can be easily expanded to provide new and interesting capabilities.

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RoboCup Soccer Simulator

About

The RoboCup Soccer Simulator(RCSS) is a research and educational tool for multi-agent systems and artificial intelligence. It enables for two teams of simulated autonomous robotic players to play soccer (football).

Two separate versions of this simulation environment exist: a 2D version and a 3D version. The 2D versions provide an environment to study high level strategies for playing soccer by hiding low level details of player robots. The 3D simulator exposes much more of the challenges of real robots and provides a rich environment to study humanoid soccer player robots. It is built on top of SimSpark simulation environment.

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Robotics Suite

Fedora 15 and beyond include the Robotics Suite, a package group that consolidates these and other robotics-related packages included in Fedora. To use it, fire up the Fedora software manager, and look for the "Robotics" package group. Alternatively, you can use yum or dnf to install the group via the command

su -c 'dnf group install Robotics'

Or:

su -c 'yum groupinstall Robotics'

Get Involved

Interested in robotics software development? Writing tutorials? Packaging? The Fedora Robotics SIG is always looking for new members. Get in touch with us if you want to help the Fedora Robotics effort!